The People, Process, & Progress Podcast - How to Transition to Effective Teleworking in 2020 | PPP #12

Episode Date: March 19, 2020

In 'How to Work Remotely,' I share tools and tips that helped me transition from the cubicle to my home office in 2019.

Hey everybody, Kevin Pannell, host of the People Process Progress podcast, coming to you from my quarantined location, which really for me is just like every other day working remote and also because I am not actually in quarantine, a little bit different. What I'm going to provide today is some foundational floor of teleworking since the vast majority of folks in these United States and across the world are teleworking. And I've been doing this for about a year now, pretty successfully. There are some challenges. It does get crazy quiet or madness with kids in the house. So hopefully this is helpful. We're going to be pretty short, going to have some public service announcements direct

from Blueberry via CDC guidelines. So we'll insert those and I'll pause to play those for you because there's a much more professional voice that has those recorded. So if we recall, the foundational four that I ascribe to, prescribe to, subscribe to, and recommend are to establish objectives, to develop an organizational chart that's all the team members, internal, external partners, etc. Gather your resources, ask early, ask often, and to have communications. And so as we are working remote, as we're going out in the field and doing mass testing, I've been in touch with some of my former colleagues and teammates that are supporting those mass COVID-19 testing operations. And this is game time for all that stuff I've talked about

in the Between the Slides podcast and on here and previous episodes. Now it's time to put to work our good collaboration, communication, incident management, incident command, and teamwork. So thank you all so much for the people in the hospitals, in the field, in the firehouses, in the offices, keeping this economy going, keeping things working. All right, here we go. The first thing I would recommend, the first objective is to each day start your day like you're going to go to an office. Get up early and exercise if that's your thing. But for sure, get up, shower, get dressed, get your coffee and your breakfast and get yourself ready. You don't have to wear maybe the same thing you would wear to work if you're in suit or business casual or whatever.

But it does help your mind space to get up and, and start your day as if you are going to get in your car and you are going to commute. So do that every day. Plus, you know, if we're, we're in this pandemic, part of it is cleanliness. So washing every day is important, whether you've left your house or house or not helps kill germs. But in your mind space, you will still be in the routine of setting alarm, wake up, get ready ready, get dressed, focus on what your goals are for the day if you haven't the night before. So start your day like you would if you were going to an office. Second thing, you've got to set up separate office space, if you can, where you can focus.

And if that means I am fortunate I have a separate office in my house, so whether other people are in my house or not, I can just go there and shut the door. And if you can't do that, if you are stuck at the kitchen table or somewhere else, really, I would get out of your bedroom. I would get out of the living room if you can, if not. And there's other folks in the house because kids are home, right? I have three kids. They're home as well is get the headphones in so get your own space at least where you can have your computer and all the other stuff we'll talk about your resources play music throughout the house sometimes working at home is is deathly quiet kind of too much you're kind of like Tom Hanks and Castaway kind of whoa man I'm getting a little loopy because you're by yourself so play some music in the background some classical classical, some jazz, something, some cat, there's coffee shop music. If you, if you, if you have an Alexa or Pandora and you say coffee shop music, that's a great one. Or again, if you can't get your own established space, put your headphones in, listen to that, that calming music, and just then you can focus.

The other objective is to make sure that you set break times for yourself about every hour. This really comes from one practically, you know, sitting there in an office, getting up, taking a walk around the floor is just more healthy for you mentally and physically. Also from an instructor perspective, when we used to teach incident commander, incident management, about 50 minutes, five zero minutes is good for a student. And then you need to take a 10 minute break, right? Get up, walk around, hit the water cooler. If you're at home, plug away, get your work done, get up, walk around, take a break every 50 minutes or so. So every hour in the hour, do some air squats, do whatever. It's really good for you. So those objectives that I

would suggest, they're pretty simple. Start your day like you're gonna commute, get up, get showered, get dressed, do your exercises. Second one, set up a separate office space and you can in another location, look at tables, folding chairs you can set up. If you were able to bring your stuff home from work, set it up like your office would. If you have a standing desk or anything else, and then make sure you're taking breaks. That will help your mind. Hopefully the weather is good where you all are. It's getting a little more sunny here in Southwest Virginia today, which is good.

And get out there and get some sunshine, get some rest, social distance, all that good stuff. But at least, you know, in your space where you can give yourself a break. The second foundational four that combined org chart really will speak to hopefully what you've done and it's possible for sure to bring teams together virtually. You know the organization is your organization what are the guidelines you have? Do you have to stay home all the time? Is there a percentage that have to be in the office and have to be remote? Are you 100% remote? You know figure all that stuff out coordinating with your

team working with your supervisor. What are our guidelines? What are the expectations for time reporting for, um, you know, work productivity, all those kinds of things. And then for yourself, right? How am I going to make this keep working? If you're not used to working remotely all the time or for an extended period, cause that could be a while for us. Um, then just working through those. So your org really doesn't change so much. And it is very possible to, you know, the nuance of establishing an organization when you're remote is you're going to have to make more phone calls or more direct messages or set up more meetings. And that'll jump us into resources, right? So the third of

the foundational four is get those resources. So clearly us working remotely in this day and age, a computer or a laptop you will need if you're, if you're lucky enough to have brought all your stuff home, bring your docking station and your extra monitors to your house. So again, you can have more visible space. If not, just make sure you have your computer or your laptop. Obviously you're going to have your cell phone or smartphone as we do these days. Make sure if you haven't already that you can forward your desk phone, if you still use one, to your cell phone. So use your work number still to give to people, but if it's auto-forwarded to your cell phone all the time, then you can still just give out

your work number if you don't want to give your cell phone number out to everyone and then you'll still get the calls, you won't miss anything. Obviously internet, I can't imagine the big players Verizon and Comcast are probably working so hard to make sure the backbone of our infrastructure of our internet is good. I'm fortunate to have Comcast, make sure you have some kind of internet and as a backup, do you have a hotspot on your cell phone? We don't want to run that all the time but it is a good backup to have if your landline goes down which in this time with way increased traffic with more people home during the day for a while that's we're probably going

to have some outages hopefully we don't do you have virtual private network or vpn access to your files if you have started working remotely already, then I would check back if you don't already have that. If you're going to start or your company's working on that, look at what kind of clients you can use. There's so many different things out there. We use Cisco, but that will give you access to all the files you need on your organization's network. The other thing you can do and this is totally against my pc use and advice is if there are files that you use a lot like your mid project and you have a plan or org charts or different programs is set up some local folders on your

hard drive so you can have redundancy and uh and again we're in continuity of operations mode now right nationally internationally is you can both, if VPN's still out, the internet's still working, you can get to those, but then you can also access them locally if for some reason your internet connection goes down and you need to work on documents and maybe go via phone call or something like that. Make sure that you have all your charging cords, right?

Do you have the USB cords you need for your keyboard mouse if you're not using a wireless? Do you have extra batteries for those? Do you have the dongle that the keyboard and mouse work with? Do you have your phone charging cord? Do you have headsets that you need for calls if you're doing like voice over IP calls? So make sure you have all the resources that can make your home office work just like you were sitting in the office communications fourth of the foundational four comms pulls this all together i mentioned the cell phone that's pretty obvious when you're remote you're going to have to have

more calls right whether that's voice over ip with the headset or direct cell phone calls so make sure that your work phone's forwarded or you've given people your cell phone. The other great tools available are Zoom, WebEx, Skype, those kind of things. You can for sure run a very efficient meeting, done it before, gotten good feedback, and have your agenda set, work down, call each person out that you need updates from or are giving updates to, and set up those Zoom or Skype or WebEx or whatever other client meeting. But make sure you have that stuff installed on your PC or your laptop. A document sharing tool, and this is not one, don't violate your IT security policies or your orgs policies.

This is just tools if you don't have these. So for me, I use VPN or I send the approved documents via email to internal folks. If you're not able to share things or you have Office 365 and SharePoint and stuff like that, if you don't have those tools and you're just your organization or you personally, if you're a freelance person, a good way to share those is Google Docs, those kind of things. They have a whole huge setup in Dropbox. I've actually used Dropbox with my teammates doing some incident management it's actually got bank level security so that's pretty good even though pretty much you know banks have been hacked and all that but it pretty

much everything's been hacked but again go with your organization's IT policies but that's a good way to collaborate with documents if you're just getting into the working remote space or your organization is. And the fourth thing on comms is proactively set up regular calls. Whether you already have a weekly team sync for projects or there's a key person that you work with on a project or in your team or in your organization is set up ongoing calls. So you stay in touch and you can catch up with how each other are doing also talk about business that needs to be done but it's just a good thing and if you have video conferencing

and folks are open to it then that can also help kind of the human connection right not everybody wants to be on video conferencing but that's a good way to do it so that's my very quick tips but I think things that can help folks really be organized and still get things done and still be efficient. So again before I review these objectives let me play this PSA. This is based on CDC guidelines as we all stay home and are safe and are working hard. Let's remember this guidance from the CDC. COVID-19, better known as coronavirus, has spread throughout the world. Symptoms of this respiratory disease may include fever, cough, and shortness of breath. These

symptoms may show up 2 to 14 days after exposure. If you are experiencing these symptoms and have come into contact or are in an area with an ongoing outbreak, please call a hotline and or consult with a physician. Clean and disinfect high-touch surfaces. For more information, please visit cdc.gov forward slash COVID-19. Thank you. And thank you for that remember the cdc is our definitive guidelines for this for some guidelines again to recap these foundational four on establishing a good work environment as we are all remote start your day objectively start your day like you would if you're going to the office set up separate space if you can. If you can't, get some headphones. Make sure you can kind of focus and then take breaks every hour. Work 50, take 10, of course, within your company's

standards. Organizationally, figure out what your organization's policies are and follow them. Figure out how you can stay synced with your team and for you, take care of yourself and your family. Resource-wise, computer, laptop, cell phone, with the the chargers with the USB cords make sure your internet is squared away if you can get VPN or virtual private networking so you can get access to your network that's great you may also have web-based access like office 365 SharePoint sites those kind of things make sure that you have all your chargers so I mentioned that again communications cell phone gonna make more phone calls for sure, whether they're

internet based or on your smartphone, cell phone. Consider if you're not already using them, things like Zoom, WebEx and Skype, get them installed, make sure they're tested. You may not be able to install them yourself on your work computer. So make sure you've reached out to your IT department. Consider things like Dropbox, Google Docs, other online sharing within the parameters of your organization. If you don't have another way to share documents outside of email, or if there's a size requirement

or something like that, and make sure you set up regular calls, set up regular syncs with your project teams, with your leadership, with whomever you need to that fits into everyone's schedule. Let's all stay in touch. Let's all continue to wash our hands. Take a breath. We'll get through it. There's good people working on this. We're all being smart. Thank you so much for listening to this. Please share it, particularly so folks can hear this PSA. If you have any questions, comments, concerns about COVID-19, go to the CDC's website. They're the pros, as I mentioned on my last podcast, and that is the definitive guidance. Thank you again. Godspeed, everyone.